1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to optical connectors that are used for systems that perform optical communications, and provide optical connection at coupling nodes of optical signals.
2. Related Art
Various telecommunications methods using electrical signals as media are standardized in order to perform mutual data communications among electronic equipments such as personal computers. For example, 10 BASE-T and 100 BASE-T according to the IEEE 802.3 standard are known as the telecommunications methods, which may be used for mutual data communications among computers, and among computers and peripheral equipments (for example, printers, and the like). In addition, higher transmission rates are desired along with the trend of performing data communications in a greater capacity in recent years. However, in the aforementioned communications methods using electrical signals as communications media, the greater the transmission rates, the more inconveniences are caused, such as, generation of crosstalk between signal lines as a result of transmission signals being made a high frequency, attenuation of the signal level by impedance mismatch, limitation of the length of cables, and the like. For this reason, it is considered to be difficult for the current technology to achieve high-speed communications at transmission rates that exceed 1 Gbps with practically reasonable costs. Under such circumstances, technologies that replace electrical signals that have so far been used as communications media with optical signals are examined. For example, such a technology has been described in a technical journal, Dec. 3, 2001 issue of “Nikkei Electronics” by Nikkei BP, Kabushiki Kaisha.
It is desired to suppress a cost increase associated with the use of the aforementioned technology in order to widely spread data communications with optical signals to household electronic appliances such as personal computers. However, it is undesirable to adopt optical connectors of the existing standards such as LC connectors and MT connectors in view of the costs. The reasons are as follows. In the MT connectors, an optical connection is established by mutually contacting ends of optical fibers, and therefore, the ends of the optical fibers need to be polished with a relatively high level of accuracy in order to secure a high optical coupling efficiency. When this polishing is conducted, in addition to the step of polishing ends of optical fibers, the steps of washing and testing are to be performed later, which would likely cause the yield to decrease, and becomes a factor to increase the cost. Moreover, because the position adjustment between connectors (between a female connector and a male connector) is conducted with guide pins, the number of parts increases, and the step of forming the guide pins is also needed, which becomes an obstruction to the cost reduction.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide low-cost optical connectors that can be readily adopted for electronic equipments of household use.